Anglo-Celtic Connections

On 21 August 2026, FamilySearch added or updated over 4.3 million indexed entries across Devon, Shropshire, and Northumberland. All three collections are freely accessible via the FamilySearch Historical Records search engine, with links to the handwritten register images directly from the transcribed indexes.

Devon Bishop’s Transcripts, 1558–1887
Count: 803,171 records, 1,735,020 personas, 93,511 images
Source: Devon Record Office.

Shropshire Parish Registers, 1538–1922
Count: 884,807 records, 2,141,787 personas, 62,913 images
Source: Shropshire Record Office.

Northumberland Parish Registers, 1538–1950
Record Count: 2,703,315 records, 6,731,835 personas, 280,015 images
Source: The Woodhorn Museum and Northumberland Archives.

Choose from these selected free online events. All times are Eastern Time, unless otherwise noted. Registration may be required in advance—please check the links to avoid disappointment. For many more events, mainly in the U.S., visit https://conferencekeeper.org/virtual/

Tuesday, 25 August

2:00 PM: Exploring the Record Matches System at MyHeritage, by Alina Khuda for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/upcoming-webinars/

2:30 PM: What Gravestones Can Tell You About Your Ancestors, by Genealogy Center staff for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center. https://acpl.libnet.info/events

Wednesday, 26 August

1:00 PM: How to Handle Duplicates and Intermarried Cousins in Your Family Tree, by Crista Cowan for Ancestry Virtual Event Series. https://www.ancestry.com/c/discover/education

2:00 PM: Women’s Suffrage: Their Rights, Roles, and Limitations, by Michael L. Strauss for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/upcoming-webinars/

Thursday, 27 August

Friday, 28 August

2:00 PM: 10 Notable Migrations in the Black Diaspora, by Diane Warmsley for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/upcoming-webinars/

Saturday 29 August

• Vision 2030. In June 2022, LAC revealed “the strategic plan that will chart its course for the rest of the decade.“Our vision is based on the following statement: Discover. Understand. Connect. While the collections remain central to our identity, the ability of users to discover, understand and connect with the collections will guide the services we provide.

  With Vision 2030, we want to:

  • facilitate access to diverse and inclusive collections
  • raise awareness of these collections among as many people as possible so that everyone can discover and understand them
  • bring people together around the stories behind Canadian experiences, cultures, communities and history.”

How are they doing?

A document posted on 30 July 2025 promised “Each year, LAC will assess whether Vision 2030’s key goals still reflect the changing environment and the needs of users. Progress toward these goals will be reported on annually.”

Where’s the report? How will the changing environment, especially developments in artificial intelligence capabilities, impact on how the goals are to be achieved.

In requesting this type of report from LAC previously, I’ve been told they will be incorporated within others, notably the annual Departmental results report. I look forward to reading whether LAC “use(d) of 100 percent clean electricity by 2025.”

In the latest Family History AI Show episode, Mark Thompson said “these (AI) tools are no longer bad at math.”

Here’s a consistency check. Each AI was prompted exactly with. “In a family tree where each person has two siblings how many siblings, first, second and third cousins of the same generation does each person have?”

Gemini and Claude returned that each person has 2 siblings, 12 first cousins, 72 second cousins, and 432 third cousins.

ChatGPT initially counted only one side of the family when calculating first cousins.  Asked to check its calculation it apologized and gave the same answer as the other two.

Gemini provided a formula. For any degree of cousin n where each person has s siblings family size k = s + 1 children:

Volume 65, Number 3 of the OGS Quarterly publication is online for members. Contents are:

From Parish to Petition: Tracing Scottish Families through the Caledonian Asylum Records, 1819–1924, by Lorna Kinnaird
A Mini Case Study: John McLennan of Lochiel and Roxborough, by Bev MacCulloch
STIGMA – An Abridged Version – Keffer Essay Contest 3rd Place, by Wendy Smith
The History of William Airth (c. 1815-1880) – Keffer Essay Contest 4th Place, by Jeff Airth
Swiss Cheesing: Stacking weak evidence into a strong DNA case, by Drew von Hasselbach
The Sackville Family of Hamilton, Ontario, by Jared James Nathan
Leaving Their Mark: The Dingmans of Cramahe, Northumberland, Ontario, by Rob Stieglitz
Mute Words, Living Voices: The Letters of Henry Giles, 1842-3, by Graham Segger,
REGULAR COLUMNS
What’s in a Name? The Trend to be Unique, by Robbie Gorr.
Coral’s Corner, by Coral Harkies.
Book Review: The Hop-Picker Murders (A Genealogical Crime Mystery) by Nathan Dylan Goodwin, reviewed by Heather Oakley
Book Review: AI for Genealogists by Natalie Webb, reviewed by Art Taylor.

Browsing through the issue, I was struck by the benefits of OGS membership advertised.
MyHeritage Library Edition — free
Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP) — half off a one-year digital membership ($10).
Discount of $5 on membership of AGS, BCGS, BIFHSGO, MGS, SGS.
Legacy Family Tree Webinars — half off for first-time subscribers.
JSTOR Access – $50 off.
International Institute of Genealogical Studies — $7 each course when purchased in a package of six.
Family Tree Maker Software — $52 off.

Miscellaneous items I found interesting this week.

Video – Bohemian Catsody

Tracing Your Irish Ancestors, an introduction by Claire Bradley for the Family History Federation.

British Library Annual Report
The 2025-26 report shows the library secured essential core government funding, made major progress rebuilding its computers and networks, and kept its public exhibits and services running; however, it faces severe multi-year budget deficits, a shrinking rainy-day emergency fund, and heavy costs and setbacks from a major 2023 cyber-attack.

Suffolk Archives New Website
When a new website is activated at the end of August reader’s accounts will not be replicated on the new system. Please ensure that you copy the details of any items on your wishlist onto your PC or device to save separately. If you have previously purchased downloads ensure that you have saved them onto your PC. If you have any problems with the downloads please email archives@suffolk.gov.uk for help.

Bookbub
“Amazing deals on bestselling ebooks.”

Thanks to the following individuals for their comments and tips: Anonymous, Craig Milne, Gail, Helen, Sue Lambeth, Sylvia Smith, Teresa, and Unknown.

There are over 5.6 million new records in the UK and Ireland Find a Grave Index collection, recently updated on Ancestry.

Ancestry’s collection Cheshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812 saw the addition of 16,436 records since the previous update two years ago.  Other Cheshire Church of England collections were cleaned up, reducing duplication. Original record images are linked throughout these collections.

Many record collections are too small and niche to attract the interest of the large genealogy companies, but none-the-less valuable. Often you’ll find them in the UK at local archives, county record offices and museums. It’s good practice to check those where you have ancestry periodically.

A recent example, documented in an 18 August blog post, is from the Essex Record Office. The Borough of Saffron Walden records contain insight into allotments in the 1830s and 1840s.  Surviving records include committee minutes (D/B 2/PAR9/5 and D/B 2/PAR9/6), allotment rent accounts which record the names of people cultivating plots (D/B 2/BRL5/71), and maps of the fields with allotment plots marked out and numbered so they can be linked to the rent accounts, allowing individual plot holders to be identified (D/B 2/BRL5/72). The minutes also contain maps of the allotments and have been digitised so can be viewed on Essex Archives Online.

MyHeritage has launched Y-DNA results that help users explore their direct paternal line based, in most cases, on existing MyHeritage DNA data, with no new test required.

Read the MyHeritage blog post here.

This service is the result of a partnership with Family Tree DNA. MyHeritage is rebranding FTDNA’s products and FTDNA now releys on some MyHeritage products.

Interestingly, both companies had changes in ownership in early 2021.

The FamilyTreeDNA brand is owned by myDNA, an Australia-based genetic testing company which merged with Gene By Gene, the parent company of FamilyTreeDNA, in January 2021.

As of February 2021 MyHeritage is owned by Francisco Partners, a San Francisco-based global private equity firm.  The company continues to operate with Gilad Japhet retaining his role as the Founder and CEO.

Will the partnership develop further?

• Consultation on Service
  LAC maintains communication with clients through various consultation and mechanisms to better understand its client base and their needs.
  – Services Consultation Committee has been inactive since 2024 and has not met recently.
  – 2025 Service Improvement Survey results were posted on 23 February 2026 linking to an extensive contractor report. The vast majority of clients expressed satisfaction with the quality of the interactions they have had in person with LAC staff. Opinions on online services were positive but less favourable. Two-thirds of current LAC clients pointed to genealogy and family history (67%) and Canada history and land (65%) as areas where LAC’s collections are of interest to them. Kudos to LAC for funding the survey.
  – Youth Advisory Council is documented in a webpage dated 12 December 2025. 10 people. age 16 – 25, served for 2025-26. The Council met four times, January — April 2026 with meeting summaries posted. While there’s good evidence of there being a genuine consultation opportunity, there’s only suggestive, not confirmed, evidence of lasting impact.
  – Stakeholders Forum comprises 15 professional organizations that meet twice a year. The last reported meeting was Fall 2025. It featured presentations sharing highlights of activities currently underway within three organizations. While the Canadian Historical Association is a member, there is no representation from any genealogical or family history group, even though they represent two-thirds of LAC’s clients.

• Newspapers
  Two decades ago LAC made a decision to reduce the resources it dedicated to newspapers.  Staff were let go. Today, on LAC’s Research Guides and Tools for Finding Newspapers, it states “Most of our newspapers are not digitized, so you will need to view them in person.” An exception is “Four Indigenous newspapers (that) have been digitized as part of LAC’s National Heritage Digitization Strategy.” That was achieived through earmarked external funding.
  Much of LAC’s legacy newspaper collection is on microfilm, available at the Ottawa location. A substantial part of that is open self-service access, although that will likely change with the move to Adisoke.  Unlike other countries newspaper initiatives, LAC remains in the microfilm age.

• Quarterly statistics on access to information and privacy
  Posted on 11 August is an overview of LAC’s ATIP workload from April 1st to June 30th, 2026 .The total number of carried over requested increased from 5,965 to 6,106, or 2.6%.

Military requests outstanding decreased by 8.5% in the three months. Government records requests outstanding increased by 12.7%.

Processing capacity for military and public servant files has scaled up dramatically over the year, meaning those seeking essential service records are experiencing better turnaround times.

General government archival requests receive a much smaller share of attention, creating frustrating bottlenecks for deep historical and lineage research.

Thousands of requests are still carried over from quarter to quarter, with some multi-year delays, guaranteeing that anyone investigating restricted historical collections will continue to face major obstacles accessing primary sources.